> My question remains, how are we all still here?  How are so many formula =
> fed=20
> adults functioning?  How are my exclusively breastfed children in the bot=
> tom=20
> of their classes, while the formula fed kids are at the top of their clas=
> s?  Of=20
> course this is a generalization, and of course I'm not talking about my a=
> ctual=20
> kids,(:)) but you get the point.  What we know to be true and what is=20
> actually heppening out there are hard to combine into intellectual=20
> statements.

Well, you could say the same thing about many issues. When I was a child, we 
didn't have car seats. How are we all still here? Should we scrap the whole 
carseat thing and encourage people to carry their babies on their laps 
again? There were babies and children who died because they were not in car 
seats, but they are not here to talk about it! The ones who are around are 
the ones who were lucky enough not to be killed or injured.

And you could certainly make those kind of comparisons: my three sisters and 
I never went in carseats, and we all survived just fine. But I have a 
neighbour who was out for a drive with her child who was in a carseat, and 
was rear-ended by a truck at a stopsign, and her child died. Those are 
anecdotal stories that really mean very little - and certainly don't tell us 
anything about the safety of carseats.

There was a study a few years ago in Pediatrics (I think) that showed babies 
who were not breastfed were significantly more likely to die in the first 
year than babies who were breastfed even for a fairly short time. Longer 
breastfeeding increased the survival rate. That's real babies and real 
deaths. No, they are not directly attributed to not breastfeeding, but the 
statistics show the connection.

It's a matter of risk, and you have to look at large numbers not individual 
cases. It's like smoking - everyone always knows someone who smoked for 60 
years and is in perfect health. Doesn't mean smoking isn't dangerous.

Teresa Pitman 

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